I arrived home yesterday from a week long Bahamas mission’s trip with the senior high students of our church where we served at All Saints Camp, home of residents with HIV/AIDS. I know I will have more to say as I have time to think, and pray, and talk with the Lord about the experience, so these are just my first impressions.
Several things come to mind right away. The first is that we have the MOST amazing bunch of teens at our church!
At first glance, they’re really no different from other teens. They care about their appearance, they want to fit in with their peers, and they’re not especially comfortable with being different.
Sometimes they don’t realize that it’s their own facial expression or body language that keeps their peers at arm’s length.
They have anxieties when it comes to new, untried experiences, while at the same time, are surprisingly willing and courageous about trying something new, especially when no parent is there to say, “you can’t do that!”.
They really care about people, whether they are little children growing up impoverished, with very little positive attention from their adult caretakers, or sick and disabled people who are prisoners of their circumstances and in need of compassion and a human touch. They can also be unintentionally oblivious to the same needs in their peers.
However, below the surface can lie an amazing capacity for spiritual depth, perseverance, hard work, love, sacrifice, selflessness, and a willingness to change, that is best seen living 24/7 with them on a mission’s trip.
The same teens that have a hard time keeping their rooms clean or keeping up with their laundry, broke sidewalks with sledge hammers, others worked all day, for 5 days, in the hot sun high above the ground, to put roof shingles on a new home.
They mixed cement with shovels, loaded it into a wheelbarrow, and then, with a running start, pushed the filled barrow up a long hill to get it to a sidewalk in progress.
Some faithfully labored away painting a home or a fence, many times in the hot sun. One girl who stepped on a nail early on, worked all day scrapping paint splotches off a porch (I did this for about 15 minutes before stir craziness made me move on to a different job). One crew worked all week, getting filthy dirty, demolishing a house and then carrying all the wood down a hill to a smelly dumpster.
The same teens that complain about what’s for lunch at home, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every single day for 8 days – washed down only with increasingly warm water - WITHOUT complaining.
The same teens who would never think of volunteering to pray or lead the family in devotions at home, led THEIR PEERS in lunch time devotions. Although we shared the week with a group from Minnesota, it was our MEFC kids who were the first to volunteer to lead the lunch time devos in 6 of the 7 work crews. I was SO proud of them!
Another first impression was God’s amazing faithfulness.
Quite a few of us had been on the last mission’s trip to All Saints Camp two summers ago. Our church was the only one there that week, so it was a very special week of bonding as a group and really getting to know one another. This time around, we knew we’d be sharing the week with a group from Minnesota which was going to be about as large as our group. That gave us some anxiety.
We wondered how that would change the experience for us. Would we all work well together? Would OUR group be able to bond when we had to share experiences with the other group?
We wondered how this trip would compare to our last? Were our expectations so high that we might end up disappointed?
Those who hadn’t been on the last trip had their own anxieties. They’d heard about the difficulty of the work and the hot, humid climate, so they were anxious about whether they’d be able to physically keep up.
In the end, we should just have trusted in God’s encouragement to “have no anxiety about anything” because the God we serve is a good and faithful God, and He more than met our expectations and dispelled all of our fears.
We lost no luggage.
All of the injuries (and there were some) were minor.
The Lord gave each one a strength beyond his/her expectations, to work and work hard – persevering through the working conditions, the climate, the inexperience, the sunburn, the blisters, and the bug bites – to lay one stretch of sidewalk, complete one roof and nearly another, completely demolish one entire building and dispose of the debris, nearly complete one beautiful handrail/fence, touch up two homes with paint, lay a cement parking lot and begin a gazebo, and to visit residents visibly ill or disabled (not many of the teens had ever done anything like this – yet they were amazingly compassionate and caring).
The Minnesota group had more boys than we did, so when we mixed the groups we were able to have a better balance of guys and girls in the work crews and so were able to handle jobs together that would have been much harder alone.
The Lord did bond us – not only to one another as the MEFC youth group – but also with the Minnesota teens working in each work crew. The good-byes at the end of the week were genuinely sweet and sincere because a real love and appreciation had formed between us (even though those Minnesotans say "pop" instead of "soda"!). Who but the Lord could have done that?
My last first impression is one I’ve often expressed when we talk about the subject of fellowship and experiencing the unity of the body of Christ. Typically churches try to foster this unity by planning dinners or programs designed to mix us up and get us talking with newcomers. They work to a degree, although often we end up sitting with the people we know and not the ones we don’t. However, between Vacation Bible School and the mission’s trips I’ve had the privilege to participate in, I’m now a firm believer that it’s SERVING the Lord together that fosters the deep bonding and experience of unity for which our hearts really long.
There is a joy, a sense of purpose, a determination to work hard and together, that happens when we are serving that I just have not found in any other way. When we work side by side we’re also able to appreciate one another’s gifts and unique personalities as we see them in action and affirm what they bring to a project.
We get first-hand experience of what being the body of Christ really LOOKS like when each member is using his or her unique gifts. We SEE that we really DO need one another in order to do what needs doing. We can’t SEE those things if we’re just talking about what the body of Christ IS and not participating in it.
After a long week of work, Saturday was our free day, and it was a wonderful day of being together. As we rode back to the retreat center where we were staying, I was enjoying the cool evening breeze through the bus window, listening to the kids singing and laughing, and I was thanking the Lord for them because I have come to love and appreciate each one.
I feel so blessed that at this stage of my life the Lord has given me such wonderful opportunities to serve Him that I never did in the days when I was WAY more physically able to do them. He has a great sense of humor! He also has helped me realize that until He calls me home, there will always be ways in which to serve Him in His kingdom.
And He has given me hope in the next generation and SUCH anticipation that He has great things in store for those teens as their faith in the God who has been so faithful to them this week uses them in the building of His kingdom!
More to follow. . . . .
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